The Influence of External Environment and Business Strategy on the Effectiveness of Management Accounting Practices: A Contingency Theory Perspective

This paper reports the results of a study of management accounting practices (MAPs) in a mix of organisations in Libya. The study explicitly focuses on the intervening role of MAPs in cause-effect relationships between external environment, business strategy and organizational performance. Regression results indicate that no single contingent variable has a significant effect on all types of MAP investigated. While budgets and performance measures are largely moulded by business strategy, the contingentness of costing practices in terms of external environment hostility is discernable, as is the mediating role of MAPs between business strategy and organisational performance. By discerning the individual impacts of the contingency variables of environment and strategy on organisational performance via MAPs (i.e. cost, budgets and measurement performance), this study gives a more in-depth understanding of these relationships and contributes to enriching our understanding of how MAPs can be adopted more effectively and efficiently from a contingency perspective, through identifying the impact of this relationship on organisational effectiveness in an emerging economy.